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The issue is

At what point does protest against government policies pass from the legitimate into the category of aiding and abetting the enemy.

It's not an easy call. My inclination would be to say that anything that is not outright traitorous - such as spying - is legitimate. Not admirable - but legitimate. Obviously, circumstances are important. The bar is much lower whe we are at war and American soldiers are being killed.

There's a price to pay for having a free and open society. This is the price.

The isolationist, "America First" types back in World War II like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford were indeed wrong, and embarrassingly so. The primary difference between them and the folks that Coulter addresses in her book is that the isolationists are pretty much universally recognized as a joke today. Nobody of any significance nowadays supports them or apologizes for them with the notable exception of Pat Buchanan, who is about as marginal a figure as you can get.

The Stalin/Soviet-philes on the other hand are still fighting their damn fight even today, years after it has already been lost. Can you really deny with a straight face that the spirit of Walter Duranty still lives on to a large degree at the New York Times and most of the rest of the mainstream media? The inability of these people to admit that they were wrong about anything borders on pathological.

It's not an easy call. My inclination would be to say that anything that is not outright traitorous - such as spying - is legitimate. Not admirable - but legitimate.

I agree completely. I also think you have been nothing but fair-minded on this thread.

The unfortunate truth is what has conservatives so upset is the partisan control over the major organs for disseminating information. They've been disenfranchised by a defacto cabal called "the media."

My personal belief is the First Amendment as currently construed is as outmoded as liberals believe the Second Amendment. I dare say the Founders would have been much more circumspect with the language of the First if they had had any notion of the principals of advertising in the modern sense, and how it can be used in conjunction with what they thought of as "the press."

Thankfully, the problem is slowly being corrected by other emergent technologies. This Iraqi engagement is the first time in living memory that foreign policy dissidents are paying a sever penalty, and that extracted not by government, but by the American people...from whom there is no esoteric legal defence.

This is, no doubt, more what the Founders had in mind.

At what point does protest against government policies pass from the legitimate into the category of aiding and abetting the enemy. It's not an easy call. My inclination would be to say that anything that is not outright traitorous - such as spying - is legitimate. Not admirable - but legitimate.

Well, unfortunately, I'm forced to agree with you. If the First Amendment means anything, it has to stand for speech that each of us finds morally and ethically repugnant.

That said, the point that I took away from Coulter's book is that liberals are not so much treasonous as they are anti-American. There are certain core values that are associated with the Democrat Party: siding with foreign powers over our own government; putting politics above national security; opposition to war (even if war is in the best interest of national security); disdain for the American social and political ethic; undermining personal responsibility and fostering governmental dependence; utter and complete incompetence on foreign policy and prosecution of war; etc, etc, etc.